Another example of differential treatment is that the potential punishment for assaulting a police officer is worse than the potential punishment for assaulting another citizen. If anything, the reverse should be true, cops willingly take on a duty with a higher risk of being attacked and it is the cops duty to be able to protect unable citizens from being attacked.

That's what limited liability really is. It's a 'high court' treatment whereby those that break the law get lesser punishments (and in fact, the stockholders are the ones punished, not the decision makers). It's how Bayer gets away with knowingly selling A id s tainted blood without having a single executive personally punished. If you or I did that, the punishments against us personally would be dire. but they are under the law of the high court, which punishes them less.

It's how Pfizer gets a lesser punishment for breaking laws that normally impose a greater punishment. The pharmaceutical cartel gets the high court treatment. This isn't anything new, Techdirt has example after example of this. America does indeed have double standards and two sets of punishments, one for the elite and one for the rest of us.

Testing, 123, testing. Bayer, something something, does this need a filter. Bayer. Is Bayer the word that makes the spam filter go nuts? Maybe it is. If I took that word out, will I get past the silly spam filter that doesn't know spam for non-spam? Is Bayer a common spam word?

That's what limited liability really is. It's a 'high court' treatment whereby those that break the law get lesser punishments (and in fact, the stockholders are the ones punished, not the decision makers). It's how B a y e r gets away with knowingly selling a ids taint ed blood without having a single executive personally punished. If you or I did that, the punishments against us personally would be dire. but they are under the law of the high court, which punishes them less.

Patents and tech are two very related subjects. After all, aren't patents allegedly supposed to promote technological advancements? So it's not outside the scope of a tech blog to discuss the merits of this allegation.

Copy'right' doesn't give artists money. Artists usually give their copy'rights' over to artificially necessary middlemen (who are only necessary because the govt wrongfully grants monopoly power over various communication channels outside the Internet), which intentionally prevents permissibly licensed content, like the above, from succeeding outside the Internet.

These monopolies exist for the same reason that all the many other govt imposed monopolies exist (ie: taxi cab monopolies, among the many others). They exist because the government seeks to only to serve monopolist interests.

The laws need to change. These monopolies need to be abolished. The FCC should either be abolished or it should stop protecting corporate monopolists who want exclusive use of broadcasting spectra. The govt needs to stop granting monopoly power over cableco infrastructure use (or the ability to build new cableco infrastructure). The law needs to impose huge penalties on collection societies that try to prevent restaurants and other venues from hosting independent musicians, without paying some unnecessary third party and without the threat of facing an expensive lawsuit, under the pretext that someone might infringe.

The laws need to stop intentionally and artificially denying alternative, independently controlled (or permissibly licensed) content from being distributed. The laws need to stop setting up a legal structure that effectively requires artists to hand over their copy protection privileges over to some (otherwise unnecessary) third party just to get their content broadcasted over public airwaves. The laws need to stop granting monopoly power on both content distribution (ie: public airwave use) and on content.

and the monopolists are seeking to do to the Internet exactly what they accomplished outside the Internet, use the government to monopolize it. and instead of lifting a finger to repeal many of its wrongfully granted monopolies, the government is only seeking to act in the interests of those monopolists.

No, the definition is anyone who thinks that our current copy protection laws shouldn't be substantially repealed. Anyone seeking to expand our already outrageously overarching copy protection laws (ie: 95+ years among their many other problems) through bills like COICA and ACTA.

These laws need to be substantially repealed, not expanded, and anyone that disagrees is reasonably an IP maximist.